Ashes of Fiery Weather (2 page)

Both the mayor and the fire commissioner retreated, and Norah herded the children to the limousine, and as they climbed in, followed by her brother, she and Delia faced each other on the sidewalk.

“I will never—” Delia began, but then pressed her lips together and turned to Joe, who helped her into the car. Norah followed.

Norah didn't want Act II. She badly needed the curtain to come down and take the audience away. Then Sean could appear from the wings, grinning and carrying a bouquet of lilies.

“You did good,” he'd say.

“That Mayor Koch,” she'd say, “he's like an egg with ears.”

And Sean would laugh.

The morning after the fire, before the children emerged from their rooms, she'd sat at Sean's desk and used his calculator. Possibly she'd never touched it before. He was the one who paid the bills and balanced the checkbook. She was almost thirty-four years old. Suppose she lived to be seventy? 70 – 34 = 36. Thirty-six years without him. More than half her life without him. She got up and lay down on his half of the bed.

Norah had the limousine drop them at her own house first so the kids could change their clothes. The after-funeral should have been at her and Sean's, but Delia insisted that her house would be better.

Though Cathal told her to stand her ground, Norah said she didn't want an argument. Delia owned the three-story brownstone that had belonged to her grandparents. It was the only one on the street that had not been cut up into apartments. Delia had grown up there herself, and after her husband left, she had taken it back from the tenants so she could raise Sean and Eileen there.

It was far bigger than Norah and Sean's two-story three-bedroom, just three blocks away. And Norah knew Sean didn't choose to live close to his mother so he could be there if she needed him. Delia didn't, as far as Norah could tell, need anyone. It was the house.

Sean had formally explained to the kids that Aunt Eileen had been adopted, and that it didn't matter. She was his sister and their aunt. Norah knew he meant it. Yet. When Norah asked him to please consider moving to Long Island because they needed more space, or even upstate, a town that wouldn't be too bad of a commute to the firehouse, Sean refused to discuss it. He was still the older child, and the boy. The brownstone certainly would have come to him, and he would have moved them into it someday.

Norah didn't change out of her funeral dress, much as she wanted to. Aidan threw on jeans and an FDNY T-shirt. After warning Maggie, who was staring fixedly into her closet, to be quick about it, Norah brought Brendan back downstairs to find Cathal standing before the small gallery of family pictures that were clustered on top of the bookcase in the front room.

Aidan went to the front door, and about every five seconds, they heard him kick it hard. Brendan dashed into the dining room to plunder his Easter basket.

“Aoife should have come,” Cathal said. “And I'll tell her that next week.”

“Next week?” Norah asked.

“I'm going home for a few days before I head back.”

Norah felt a rising panic. Of course Cathal would be leaving. He wasn't about to take up permanent residence on her couch.

“You should go to Ireland, once the kids are out of school,” Cathal said gently.

But she wouldn't be doing any traveling this summer if things remained as they were. She had the urge to tell her brother that she was pregnant. It would be like jumping off a cliff. Or backing away from one.

Instead, she shook her head. “Airfare for all of us.”

“We can help with that.”

“We?”

Though Cathal never spoke of anyone, Norah suspected that he had a girlfriend he couldn't bring home. A non-Catholic. A black girl.

“Me and Eamonn and Donal,” Cathal said after a hesitation.

There wasn't any way he'd meant their brothers, but Norah let it go.

“We'll see.”

She went back to the foot of the stairs. “Magdalena! Pick any shirt!”

When she got back to the living room, Cathal said, “I hate to bring this up today, but the fire department, they
will
take care of you?”

“Three quarters,” she said, and then, realizing he didn't know the lingo, she added, “Three quarters of Sean's pay for life.”

Cathal nodded, and Norah read his thoughts: that can't be much for someone with three kids. It wasn't. Even with his full salary, Sean had still worked odd jobs as a carpenter when they came his way through the firehouse.

Maggie arrived in the living room still wearing her dress.

“Can I stay home?” she asked.

“You are not sitting around the house by yourself,” Norah said. “You'll come to Gran's and get something to eat.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“You'll come to Gran's and not eat, then.”

“Can I read?”

“You can stand on your head in the backyard if you like,” Norah said.

Maggie noticed Brendan in the dining room and charged, shrieking, “Just because you ate all yours already doesn't mean you get to take mine!”

Brendan dove under the dining room table and scooted out the other side, bolting as Maggie frantically inventoried her Easter basket.

Brendan threw his arms around Norah's waist. Norah licked her thumb and rubbed away the chocolate from the corners of his mouth. She didn't spoil him—she didn't—but today she couldn't deal with it.

Maggie stomped into the living room. “Three of my chocolate eggs are gone.”

Aidan shouted from the front door. “They're all waiting for us.”

“For God's sake, Aidan, it isn't a surprise party.” Norah pressed the heel of her hand into her firming belly and pushed a little. There was no Sean to cut them down with his decisive “Knock it off!” She was never the bad cop.

Norah put her narrowed eyes on her daughter. “Are you going to change?”

The front door banged. Aidan leaving. Norah shut her eyes.

“Norah?” Cathal said quietly.

She opened her eyes and said to Cathal, “Can you go with him? I'll sort this out.”

During the Mass, the other wives had gone to Delia's house and set up. The food was arranged on the dining room table. Plates were out and napkins and plastic utensils. The refrigerator was stocked with Budweiser and Schaefer and Coke and ginger ale. There were stacks of plastic cups. Folding chairs set up. Ashtrays placed about.

Though she kept the black dress on, Norah discarded the stockings and heels. She would be a bohemian widow. When she thought the word “widow,” it didn't seem as though Sean had died, only that the alphabet went mad after the first two letters of “wife.”

Need anything? You're all right? He was, I know. Thank you, yes. He was.

I'm fine, thank you. I'm fine, really. Thank you. We'll be all right, thank you.

The rituals of the wake and funeral had let Norah hide the rattling of her bones. But now that they were nearing the end of the scripted part, her hands were being taken by fits. The right kept reaching for the left and clasping it tightly enough to hurt. She twisted her wedding ring around and around and kept grasping the gold replica of Sean's badge that she wore on a slim chain around her neck. Sean had given it to her not long after he'd transferred to the Glory Devlins.

Norah, near midnight the day of the fire—after Delia had left and she'd made Eileen go with her, which neither of them wanted, but Norah was too tired to care, after the children were finally in bed, and quiet, though maybe crying into their pillows (she refused to look)—she'd remembered Sean's wedding ring. Firemen weren't allowed to wear jewelry on the job, and she was forever telling Sean to take off the ring before going to work. It was a silver claddagh, of which hers was a more slender version. But she looked, and it was not on top of his bureau or hers. In a panic, she'd called the firehouse.
Check his locker,
she begged whoever answered the phone.

It was Frank Burkell who walked over. Norah opened the door before he could knock. Frank uncurled his fist, and after Norah snatched the ring, in the porch light she saw that the crown had left an impression in his palm.

A hardware store. Combustibles in the basement. An explosion. The floor collapsing. Sean plunging into the basement. But not before shoving the probie behind him to safety.

Norah could not stop her mind from chasing itself. The shove meant he'd realized it was about to go bad. For at least a few seconds, he'd known. It had taken the men almost a half hour to get to him. The collapse had blocked the only door to the basement. She hadn't asked if he'd radioed a mayday from the basement as it filled with water from burst pipes.

An hour before the wake began, she'd added Sean's wedding ring to the necklace. When she hurried up or down stairs, the Maltese cross and the ring clinked together, a sound almost a musical note but never quite.

Norah could not sit still. Conversations dove in each ear, swooped up her nose. She walked a circuit from the living room, on the parlor floor, and down the stairs to the garden floor, where the kitchen was. The door opened into the backyard, which abutted the yard of the firehouse, where Delia's father and maternal grandfather once worked. A ladder leaned against the wall that separated the yards, and as a child, Sean used to climb over it and hang out at the firehouse.

Sean's first permanent firehouse had been in Brownsville. During those years, Norah hadn't worried about him being killed in a fire so much as being shot running into one.

After three years, Sean had put in for a transfer, and got sent to the Glory Devlins. I did my time, he said. Norah assumed he made a few phone calls to make it happen. She never asked. It wasn't her business.

Delia sat in the blue easy chair, Sean's chair, and Nathaniel sat beside her on the ottoman. Her face was turned away. Nathaniel was leaning forward and speaking, too softly for Norah to hear.

She moved away without disturbing them.

Need anything? You're all right? He was, I know. Thank you, yes. He was.

She saw a tall man with dark blond hair standing by the front windows, and she took two steps toward him, ready to shout “Where have you been?” before she realized it was Keith Powell, the company chauffeur, the one who'd written the song about women firefighters. He'd sung it at the picnic last year. Norah recalled only two lines:

We used to sleep without any covers,

Can't now in case they become our lovers.

She'd laughed with a little bit of guilt, but she couldn't for the life of her understand why any woman would want to be a fireman. Eileen was out of her head.

She watched Eileen navigate the rooms. The men stopped talking as she came near, and most looked away.

Back in 1977, when women were allowed to take the test for the FDNY for the first time, and Eileen decided to do it, Sean laughed and said no way in hell would she pass the physical. Indeed, not a single woman had.

One of the other women who failed, Brenda Berkman, also happened to be a lawyer, and she filed a lawsuit,
Berkman et al. v. FDNY.
Eileen was informed by mail that she was one of the “et als.” She'd said in amazement that suing never would have occurred to her. None of the men imagined the FDNY would lose the lawsuit.

But the judge ruled that the current physical test was unfair and that the department had to design a new one that actually tested the skills used on the job. That is, a test that didn't rely almost entirely on upper-body strength. Bullshit, Sean said. How the fuck could firefighting not require upper-body strength?

Eileen and fifty-two other women passed the new test.

Yeah, Sean said, and all the guys said, because they made it easier, not better. If the women had passed the same physical as the men, fine. Let them on. But they didn't. They passed
the soft test.

Eileen had graduated from the fire academy last year, a full five years after she first applied. So did eleven other women.

Norah tried to slip past Grace Grady with a quick nod, but Grace put a hand on Norah's shoulder, her pretty green eyes lit with sympathy. Norah barely stopped herself from slapping her hand away. Grace was the girl at school who was lovely without trying, and you'd hate her for it if she weren't so nice.

It was Grace who'd taken charge of setting up the house this morning. If the power went out, Grace would have candles and extra batteries for each flashlight. She'd probably never used her sleeve to wipe her kids' noses, and she'd surely never had to pull the Halloween decorations off the windows because she'd run out of candy. Norah bet that on the nights her husband worked, Grace still cooked meatloaf or chicken for her three boys, not hot dogs or grilled cheese the way Norah did.

Grace had a small stack of dirty paper plates in one hand.

“Norah, don't forget we're right up the street. Kev said to let you know that he already takes Danny to baseball practice and he'd be happy to bring Aidan along too. Danny said he didn't mind losing out on playing first base because it was Aidan . . . And Brian's my soccer player. He said he'd teach Brendan a few tricks. Whatever you need.”

That's just what we need, Norah thought. Football tricks for my four-year-old. Not soccer but football. All her years in the States and she still turned things Irish in her mind. She nodded, and Grace pulled her hand back.

“We'll miss him, Norah,” she said. There were tears in her eyes.

Norah thanked her and continued on. She felt Grace's gaze between her shoulder blades.

She went down to the garden level again, intending to step outside for some air. She recalled how strange it had looked to her when she first arrived in Brooklyn to see doors built into the sides of stairs, as if to some kind of secret passageway. As soon as Norah opened the door, she heard the voices of firemen and smelled the cigarette smoke.